The New City

by Stephen Amidon

And then Wooten was standing over her. He stared down at her for a moment, his expression almost sad. He offered her a big, open hand. Still dazed, she reached up and took it. He lifted her to her feet as if she were a child.

  Truax finally moved forward. When Wooten saw him he released Irma’s hand.

  “Take her home, John,” he said gently.

  Truax reached for his wife’s arm but not before Sally Swope had intervened. Truax hazarded a look at Swope himself, who stood a few feet off, watching Irma with an intent expression.

  “Irma?” Sally said. “Let’s get you inside and see if we can get you cleaned up a bit.”

  Irma looked around, understanding suddenly where she was.

  “No,” she said with surpassing dignity. “We’ll go now. Please continue. We will go.”

  10

  Teddy arrived at Susan’s just after eight. He parked the Firebird around the corner to avoid prying eyes—his presence would imply Joel’s, which would mean big trouble with Irma. These were the sorts of things Teddy thought about. Joel and Susan would have never been this careful. So often, it was up to him to do their thinking for them. They really were lucky to have him as a friend. He shuddered to think what they would do without him. He really did.

  He’d hurried over right after seeing the showdown. Fuck the tunes—this was big. He’d watched it from his usual spot in the den, where he was spinning his dad’s feeble, Bacharachian disks, dropping the needle squarely into the smooth, intersong valley every time, as slow and silent as the Eagle landing, with not so much as a whisper leaking from the speakers. The party was lame—ass-kissing guests crammed on the redwood deck, their conversations melding into a single upbeat chorus punctuated by arpeggios of soft laughter. Heads perpetually nodding, as if they were a field of poppies set swaying by a gentle breeze. Teddy had been about to call it a night when he saw something that caused him to drop the needle a good ten seconds into “Son of a Preacher Man.” The Wootens and the Truaxes, facing off like football captains before a grudge match. The tension was obvious. The Earl stood as tall as Mean Joe Greene, his big head drawn back slightly, as if he’d just whiffed something unpleasant. Ardelia had her head cocked to the right, her eyes screwed up suspiciously, the same expression she used when dealing out detentions. It was hard to see Truax’s face, though Teddy could tell by the rigid set of his shoulders that this wasn’t his idea of a good time. But it was Susan’s mom who was clearly out of control. Her face was screwed up into a knot of anger and hate, her skin flushed a vivid pink. The highball glass teetered precariously in her hand.

  Although Teddy couldn’t hear what was being said, he knew this was about Susan and Joel. And then he noticed the Swope, staring coolly at the warring couples from ten feet off. Teddy wondered what he was thinking. Probably that he was going to can Truax. You do not, after all, fuck with the Earl. Finally, he stepped up to the foursome and said something that caused them all to look like they’d been caught circle jerking. Teddy decided it was time to boogie and tell Joel about this.

  He stepped up onto the Truaxes’ front porch and hit the button. At first he thought no one was home. The lights were all out and the doorbell echoed emptily through the house. He glimpsed his T-shirt in the storm door. I’m not as think as you stoned I am. Written in hazy letters, like they were under water. Fairly fucking funny. As he waited he noticed the strange silence that gripped the street. It took him a minute to realize what was missing. Wind in the trees. The just-planted saplings that lined the road were still too small to catch much breeze. The only sound was the hiss of the Truaxes’ gaslight. Various insects circled it, as if waiting clearance from some unseen controller to throw themselves into the flame.

  He rang again. Still no answer. He began to wonder if Joel and Susan had made other plans and simply neglected to tell him. Anger began to rise in him, the kind of rage he used to feel back in Potomac, when the other boys would ditch him. It used to happen a lot. He’d see them whispering together, casting quick glances his way. And then they’d vanish, trailing a mist of mocking laughter. The first few times he just stood there, waiting for them to come back so they could all share a laugh. Because Teddy wasn’t above a little joke at his own expense. Only they never did return. In the end he stopped hanging out with the Potomac boys. He didn’t need those jerks. His dad was his friend. And then they left Potomac and he met Joel. The test results came in, the awards were awarded, the applications accepted. It had been a long time since anybody ditched Teddy.

  Which was why he was getting so pissed standing here on the Truaxes’ front porch. He’d reached out to ring for the third and last time when he heard bare feet hitting the hall’s tiled floor. The door flew open and Joel was standing there, wearing jeans and a shirt that was too big for him. Something he’d stolen from his father, no doubt. It was unbuttoned, revealing the muscles of his chest and some recently sprung curls of hair. His eyes were hooded.

  “Teddy, man,” he said. “We crashed.”

  Joel led him to the small den at the back of the house, trailing an odor of sweat and ammonia that cut through the house’s usual cabbagey reek. One of his collar’s wings stuck up, like an opened envelope. They arrived at the sliding-glass door at the back of the house. Joel worked the lock.

  “Where’s Susan?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “How about Saint Darryl?”

  “Making the world safe for virgins.”

  They stepped out onto the small deck overlooking the quarter-acre backyard. An unfurled hose snaked across the sod to a small island of wood chips. The sapling there didn’t look like it was going to make it. Knee-high shrubs formed borders with the other yards. No fences in Newton, Teddy thought. Joel collapsed onto the weathered love seat; Teddy perched on a chair. The only other thing on the porch was a barbecue with a smoked-out window.

  Teddy fired up a jay and handed it to Joel.

  “So how was the party?”

  “Bag of assholes.”

  Teddy flicked burnt paper on the stained wood deck.

  “Though your folks got into it with Susan’s, I think.”

  Joel looked up sharply.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I saw them all squared off.”

  “Fuck. What were they saying?”

  “Couldn’t hear. But the knives were out, man. You shoulda seen Irma’s face.”

  Teddy imitated. Joel shook his head.

  “Not good.”

  There was a noise—Susan putting on a record in the den.

  “Don’t say anything to Susan about this,” Joel commanded.

  Teddy mimed locking his mouth just as music began to waft through the open door. Ram. A choice that was no doubt intended as a deliberate slight. Susan knew he hated McCartney. In fact, he hated all the Beatles. They’d held back John’s genius for years. Ringo, for instance, was clearly a knuckle-dragging cretin, while George had a terminal case of saffron on the brain. And Paul was a malignant little Muzak-meister whose sole purpose was to stand between John and his destiny. What was worthy in the band’s output—“Revolution” or “Julia” or “Come Together”—were basically solo efforts by John. The sublime genius of Plastic Ono or Live Jam only proved Teddy’s point. It saddened him to think what would have happened if John had gone solo back in ′64. He’d explained all this at length to Susan, which was why her spinning McCartney’s down-home horseshit was inexcusable. But Teddy decided to let it ride just as she emerged, wearing nothing more than a football jersey that hung to her knees.

  “Hey, Teddy,” she said in the bored voice she used to greet him. “How was the party?”

  “Snoresville.”

  She nestled close to Joel.

  “You see my mom?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She sloshed?”

  Teddy shrugged. He could feel Joel’s eyes on him.

  “She seemed all right.”

  Teddy rolled another joint. Yet another skill of his. He was practiced in all the lesser
hallucinogenic arts. Joint rolling and bong ventilation; shotgunning screwdrivered beers and seed separation in the crotch of a splayed record cover. He knew that the Rorer 714 was the only authentic ’lude and that black beauties made your sweat stink if you took them on an empty stomach. All that stuff. As he rolled, he told them about the latest chapter of his novel, The Widening Gyre. He’d been working on the book since Christmas, writing nearly two hundred pages, roughly 10 percent of its prospective length. It was amazing, telling the story of Gideon Horniman, an American Everyman making his way through the just-concluded decade. Gid, as he’s known, is the son of Orville Horniman, an Oppenheimeresque bigwig at the Manhattan Project, and his frail wife, Jenny, a former Hollywood B-movie actress. Born in 1944, Gid appears to be a genetic write-off, his father’s irradiated gametes lumbering him with deformities so bad that Orville secretly abandons him at a Nevada test sight after informing poor Jen that the infant succumbed to his defects. Unknown to Orville, the baby is discovered by Winston Hickey, a sort of latter-day shaman/scavenger who decides to raise him at his hidden ranch, the Bar None. Miraculously, under Hickey’s herbalistic care, Gid outgrows his worst genetic taints, until the only remaining abnormalities are a gift for mind reading and a massive schlong. After the beloved Hickey is killed by a freak desert storm that impales him with two thousand windblown cactus needles, Gid sets out to discover the truth of his patrimony, a journey that takes him through the key events of the 1960s, including JFK’s assassination, Vietnam, the Beatles at Shea (where he has a forty-one-page conversation with John), the DNC in Chicago and the march on Selma. His psychic abilities and gargantuan member get him out of all sorts of scrapes as he draws closer to Orville, who now runs a shadowy right-wing organization known as The Widening Gyre. Teddy wasn’t sure how it would end, though he was planning to finish it by the time he graduated Harvard, so that it wouldn’t interfere with law school.

  Tonight, he was telling Joel and Susan about Chapter Eight, in which Gid stows away on a Mercury shot. Only, they seemed more intent on frenching than listening. Several times, Teddy had to pause for them to finish. When he finally got to chapter’s end Joel was smiling. Teddy felt a sudden swell of pride. He liked it.

  “Teddy, man—do us a favor.”

  “Sure.”

  “Could you keep an eye out for Susan’s folks?”

  Teddy’s elation vanished.

  “Why? Where are you guys going?”

  Joel rolled his eyes. Susan shook her head and snorted quietly. Teddy got it.

  “Oh. Yeah. All right. Cool.”

  They were through the sliding-glass door in a heartbeat. He heard them laughing as they ran up the stairs. It was almost like they were laughing at him. But that couldn’t be. Joel would never laugh at him. Still, this was most uncool. Inviting him over and then using him as some kind of early parental warning system while they played hide the salami.

  Teddy went back into the house and removed the stylus from Ram, replacing it with some Tull. He began to walk off his anger downstairs. The Truax house was dinky. A den that had one of those treasure maps you could buy at Pier 1. Living room decorated with a shelf full of Lladro sculptures—clowns and dancers and a girl holding a fawn. Cramped little dining room that could barely contain the six-seater table, its main decoration a display of ornamental spoons with German writing on them.

  Pathetic.

  The kitchen was clean but stank of sauerkraut, a smell so deeply pervasive that Teddy began to suspect Irma had hung cabbage wallpaper. The stuff certainly looked vegetative, with its pale green tint and bumpy texture. Teddy raided the fridge, downing a few slices of olive loaf. The pantry was a bummer—Irma’s idea of munchies inclined heavily toward the pretzel. He finished off a bag of Rold Golds, chasing them with a drag of RC Cola. In the den, Aqualung was sitting like a dead duck. That old ditched feeling was coming back with a vengeance now. This sucked. He wasn’t going to hang around for this. He thought about simply hopping in the Firebird and heading back to the party without so much as a by-your-leave. But that would be wrong. A Susan thing to do. Better to tell them he was going, so they could see just how bad they were doing him.

  He killed the Tull and went to the bottom of the stairs.

  “Joel?” he half called. “Later, man.”

  There was no response. He started to climb the steps. He’d never been upstairs at Susan’s before. Even the time Joel showed him the picture of Irma with old Adolf he’d had to wait downstairs like some kind of fucking nimrod. But he knew the layout. These EarthWorks boxes were all alike. Bedrooms, bathrooms, walls. No surprises. The master bedroom was immediately to the left of the steps. He pushed the door open and turned on the light. There was a king-sized bed and a big dresser. A recliner and small roller desk. Closets. The bathroom off to one side. Something caught his attention—framed photographs arranged in a perfectly straight line above the desk. Teddy went for a closer look. All of them pictured an olive-fatigued John Truax at war. Seated at a card table outside a trailer. Standing next to a jeep. Crouching beside what looked to be the entrance of a small tunnel, a very large pistol in his hand. The last showed him squatting in front of a sandbagged bunker with a handwritten sign that read MY SONG MOTOR LODGE above the entrance. In each, he had that severe, lipless countenance that gave Teddy the willies. As if a single grim photo of Truax had been pasted on his body in each of the pictures.

  Teddy squelched the lights and headed down the hall to Susan’s room. He listened at her door for a moment. He could hear music. Across the hall was Darryl’s room, as tidy as her conscience. There was a movie poster on the wall, Pat Boone in The Cross and the Switchblade. Beside that was a watercolor of Christ holding a lamb. The single bed was piled with stuffed animals. He turned his attention back to Susan’s door, unsure what to do. He didn’t want to call out—that would seem creepy, like he’d been spying on them. Just go, he thought. They don’t care. They won’t even notice you’re gone. Then he saw that the door was off the latch. Inside, he could now hear urgent breathing and quick whispers. Before he could even think about what he was doing he’d given the door a tentative shove. It opened a few inches. He moved backward, waiting to be ordered away.

  Nothing happened. He pushed the door open even farther. Susan’s room was what he’d expected. Posters. A bulletin board ticketed with photos and concert stubs. A dresser cluttered with gels and potions. There was a big candle sputtering in the middle of it, encrusted by laval formations of multicolored wax. “Killing Me Softly” warbled from the cheap cassette player on the floor. Just some girl’s room. Except that Teddy’s best friend was in it, lying naked on top of a girl whose bare legs were wrapped around his thighs. They were kissing deeply. Susan’s eyes were closed, her brow furrowed, like she was trying to work out some deep puzzle. Teddy couldn’t see Joel’s face, just the back of his head and the stretched muscles of his neck. And then Joel began to move into her. Susan’s head arched back, her upper lip sneering in pleasure. Teddy could see her breasts now, bigger than he thought they would be, their nipples dark and wide. Nothing like a girl’s. He began to get hard. Joel rolled a bit to the side and Susan’s hip rose up out of the turbulent blankets. There was a split Trojan packet on the pile carpeting.

  Joel whispered something, breaking the spell, reminding Teddy where he was and what he was doing. He stepped back quickly, pulling the door as he moved. It remained an inch off the latch. He could feel his heart pounding like mad. His cock pushed against his Jockeys. Behind the door Susan cried out, a prolonged ululation that caused Teddy to retreat all the way into Darryl’s room. Their bodies were in his mind, filling it up, pushing everything else out. He pictured himself sitting on the edge of that bed, running his hands over Joel’s body and Susan’s body, feeling the tip of her nipple against his palm, the soft kink of Joel’s hair. He unbuttoned his jeans and freed his cock. It didn’t take long. A few strokes. Susan’s body and Joel’s body. He remembered where he was just as he started to come. He reached
out for the first thing he could get his hands on, a stuffed unicorn on Darryl’s bed. He buried his cock in the fold between its head and body, pumping into it. Three times, four times. Feeling everything drain out of him. The pleasure. The excitement. The last thing to go was the image of Joel and Susan.

  Desolation washed over him. You sick fucking fool, he thought. Look at yourself. If Susan saw you like this she’d laugh in your face. And Joel would simply shake his head. Susan loves Joel and Joel loves Susan and you’re just in the way. The lookout. The one who gets ditched. He wiped the tip of his diminishing cock on the unicorn’s smiling face and tossed it into a dark corner of the room. Figure that one out, Darryl. The holy spirit’s crusty ectoplasm. He buttoned his fly. They were still making noises in Susan’s room. The anger Teddy had been suppressing ever since his arrival finally boiled over. Who the fuck did they think they were dealing with, leaving him alone like this? The bitch Susan had stolen his one and only friend away. Turned Joel’s mind inside out. And he fucking let her. Teddy had offered them his company and his wisdom and they’d spit in his face. He really would go now. Never speak to them again. It might take a few days but Joel would soon realize how badly they’d fucked up by doing him like this, how empty things were going to be.

  But before he could move something froze him in the middle of the room like a jacklit deer. Headlights. They washed over Pat Boone and Jesus and then Teddy himself. They were gone as quickly as a pulse of lightning. And with the darkness came a faint tectonic rumble beneath his feet.

  The garage door. Susan’s folks were home.

  Teddy looked at the digital clock next to Darryl’s bed: 9:33. Way too early for anyone to be back. He moved to Darryl’s doorway, listening to what was going on in Susan’s room. The music continued to play. Laughter and sighs. A soft wet noise. They hadn’t heard. Which meant he had to tell them. Quickly, so Joel could get dressed and they could hide while Susan dealt with the sarge. Or maybe they could just jump out the window like Butch and Sundance. Like the old days. Shouting shi-i-it, then laughing all the way to the getaway car.